sci-fi
Kieron Tyler
Amsterdam is in ashes. The Vatican City has been wiped off the map. Abandoned cars litter Trafalgar Square. The National Gallery has become the base camp for an arms-dealing Major. It’s a bad time alright, yet a group of people aren’t fussed about that. Instead, they are exercised by the death of the father of Jerry Cornelius. Dad had a formula, a computer programme they’re seeking. It’s the final programme. A programme which will create a super-human.This adaptation of the Michael Moorcock science fiction-adventure book of the same name was released in 1973. It was retitled The Last Days of Read more ...
Simon Munk
Stunningly good entertainment, interesting art, rubbish game. Beyond: Two Souls does more than any other videogame around to further the cause of interactive narrative fiction – sadly, by jettisoning most of the "interactive" bit.Beyond: Two Souls predecessor is 2010's Heavy Rain. It's probably one of the most important videogames of the last ten years. Ostensibly an update of the old "point-and-click" adventure genre, you play as four characters whose lives cross in a rainy city – your job is to choose dialogue options, solve puzzles and occasionally grapple with action sequences where you Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
As good as many films are, few have the “wow” factor that leaves you elated, high as a kite. Gravity is one of those. Alfonso Cuarón’s space drama is a cinematic tour-de-force, after which it takes quite a while to come back to Earth.A team of US astronauts are space walking outside their shuttle. Mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) calmly tells jokes while he enjoys the view; Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a scientist on her first mission, is a bag of nerves. Suddenly they receive a message from Houston that the debris from a destroyed Russian satellite is speeding towards them. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are two schools of critical thought when it comes to stories set in fantastical worlds. The first implies that it’s difficult to argue for realism and consistency in something that’s supposed to be a bit of fluff, where not only have aliens invaded New York but those aliens have been defeated by “among others: a giant green monster, a costumed superhero from the 1940s, and a god”. But if that argument is to hold any water, why do you suppose approximately 93% of the internet is devoted to debating gaps in canonicity in the likes of Doctor Who? At this stage, it’s hardly a spoiler Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Czech director Jindřich Polák’s 1963 science fiction epic Ikarie XB 1 was known in the West for many years only in a recut dubbed version. Happily, Second Run’s restored print looks and sounds marvellous. There is a slowly unfolding narrative, though Ikarie grips more as an acutely realised study of what life could actually be like on a 15-year space voyage.Polák’s source material was a novella by Stanisław Lem, better-known for Solaris, and a team of scientific advisors was assembled by Polák to give the adaptation greater credibility. One character describes the Ikarie spaceship as “a Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Janelle Monáe’s much-awaited second album doesn’t disappoint. She navigates the ever-renewing waters of African-American pop invention, drawing on R & B, funk, gospel, rock and dinner jazz, with a sense of fun and a great deal of talent. She is a master of eccentric chic, sophisticated, with a hint of the (tastefully) bizarre.Questions of identity have both haunted and inspired black culture in the USA. Monáe, with her cyborg and extra-terrestrial alter egos, mines a vein of fantasy that the likes of George Clinton and Sun Ra have explored before her: the space-man or woman as avatar of a Read more ...
Simon Munk
A planet ravaged by snowstorms, home to a load of angry reptilian aliens, with human colonies surviving on a mix of giant "mech" walking vehicles and hoarding thermal energy – Lost Planet's setting has always been fairly interesting. It's a shame then that this prequel so badly bodges everything.Told in a series of flashbacks, your gee-shucks, country-loving, everyman contractor is just there, initially, to kill the alien creatures, repair equipment and trudge around in a walking forklift. But soon you uncover a conspiracy among the companies running the colony and it all kicks off.Or rather Read more ...
Simon Munk
The Saints Row series has always been something of a magpie, stealing liberally from other games. It started out as a cheap second-tier Grand Theft Auto clone. But here, it transforms into a very silly, but great fun knockabout superhero game - the most gleefully rampaging fun gameplay you'll see this week.Trying to summarise the plot of Saints Row IV should give you some sense of exactly how seriously the game takes itself. The members of a street gang, called The Saints, decide to put their gangbanging past behind them and turn their appetite for destruction to good – they take on a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Neil Blomkamp’s got a thing for crafts. Spacecrafts, that is. With his first feature, District 9, alien ships hovered over Johannesburg in 1982. Now it’s 2154 and Elysium, a nirvana-like space station for the elite, floats in Earth’s orbit, using all the global resources and leaving the planet ravaged, polluted, riddled with crime and simply dreadful.Max (Matt Damon) is an ex-con gone straight. As a boy, he promised his childhood girlfriend Frey (Alice Braga) they too would live in Elysium. Of course, in the grown-up world, that’s impossible: they're only ordinary citizens. Making matters Read more ...
Simon Munk
This curious strategy series popped out of the head of legendary games-maker Shigeru "Mario, Donkey Kong" Miyamoto when he started gardening. But beneath the verdant landscapes and gigantic primary-coloured fruits there is a darker, richer soil.In Pikmin 3, three space people arrive on an unspoilt planet, desperately seeking food, their own planet having been strip-mined to starvation. In this new lush land they find an abundence of food, and a curious species - half flower, half ant. The Pikmin are only too happy to help the spacefarers – carrying food, attacking predatory enemies, ferrying Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just three Cornettos: the trilogy accidentally named after an ice cream concludes here. Previously in the imaginations of actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright, London has been invaded by zombies and a quiet English village by organised crime. In The World’s End, it’s the turn of a faceless Home Counties feeder town to fall under the influence of yet another B movie sub-genre. In this case the local population is replaced by robots (although what precisely constitutes a robot is one of the film’s fun running gags).Is there just a hint of weariness as Pegg, Wright and faithful lumpen co- Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's the First Night and there's the Last Night. Nowadays among the staples of the two-month world-famous festival of music at the Royal Albert Hall, there is also the Doctor Who Prom. Last night, to mark the 50th anniversary of the resurgent TV sci-fi show, a celebration was laid on featuring Murray Gold's music from the last eight years of Doctor Who.Performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the London Philharmonic Choir under Ben Foster, there was also, to tickle the musical tastebuds of the fans, some music not hitherto noted for its connection to Daleks, Cybermen, time Read more ...